The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the slashdot community can help him out by posting here.

Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.

so.dan writes: Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist reports that the "File sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker [that] have been big news in the United States for months... are coming to Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has paved the way for the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who are alleged to have copied the movie." This is the first I've ever heard of MAFIAA lawsuits beginning to succeed in Canada. The move seems to target larger ISPs. Are subscribers of smaller ISPs — who must lease their lines from the larger ones such as Bell — relatively protected from such invasions of privacy due to some sort of technical difficulty in determining the names of subscribers? (Please excuse my technical ignorance). And if so, should Canadians opt for smaller ISPs to aid the protection of their privacy?

so.dan writes: Wikipedia will be using a $1.2M grant donated by the Stanton Foundation — founded by Frank Stanton, ex-chairman of the policy think-tank The RAND Corporation — to "improve" articles dealing with public policy. The Stanton Foundation still sponsors RAND and other research institutions. It frightens me that such a large donation would be accepted by a single donor to change articles which educate the public on political issues from a group which is itself so focused on these issues. I thought that Wikipedia's political articles gained some credibility from the extent to which contributions to these pages were decentralized.